


The ransoun made, the prisoneris redeemit

by sshysmm



Category: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Nudity, One-sided pining, Pining, Post-Canon, Solitary Confinement, boys being dumb, for God's sake Jerott, unfair use of poetry, wild swimming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-04-05 22:59:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19050211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sshysmm/pseuds/sshysmm
Summary: St Mary’s — Summer, 1566Jerott Blyth has not set foot in Scotland since the death of his wife. Francis Crawford has not left since then. Through the intervening years, a building sense of lack finally brings Jerott back to St Mary’s Loch, in the hope of putting an unwanted feeling behind him. Isn’t it the case that there’s nothing like reality for reminding you of your idol’s flaws?--“It’s good to see you too, Jerott.”They might have been neighbours accustomed to encountering one another in their daily routines on land and in water. Francis had not been surprised to find Jerott riding alone to his estate on an unremarkable summer morning, and Jerott had not been surprised to find Francis exercising in the cool loch, as content to needle his unexpected guest with ironic verse as if Jerott had only left St Mary’s a week ago.--For Scotswap 2019, a gift for Lamen-king on tumblr, who gave me the most delicious prompt I could have asked for.I finished this a little early, and then Chapter 2 sort of wrote itself. If you prefer things to remain one-sided, strictly UST, then please just enjoy Chapter 1.





	1. The ransoun made

**Author's Note:**

> This is in many ways similar to my other Lymond fic, Aime qui vouldra, but doesn't quite take place in the same imagined timeline. I really love picking at this relationship.  
> The title is from the Dunbar quoted by Francis.

Ripples of light wound their way across the water, jinking and weaving until they slowed and spread apart, finally gliding in to lavish the bank with their languid kisses. The water was not the clearest; the sky was not the bluest; the sun that made the horseman squint across the loch was far from the warmest. Still he filled his chest deep and broad as he could with the bright air. It was scented with gorse and the sweet wet mud of the well-ridden path. Summer flowers shivered in the gentle embrace of grass and rushes, and the breeze lifted the sound of a curlew from the far side of the water.

The sound made the horseman shudder. It resembled the high-pitched cry of a girl: three screams, the last one fading out mournfully. The encircling hills remained silent, impassive to the sorrow in that voice — both audience and enclosure. The rider looked up at the blocky stone tower he had been approaching and reminded himself that the girl who had screamed three times had been angry, not sorrowful. Betrayed by all and mourned by none. Still, he supposed she had every right to haunt the place, as did many others. Was that not also why he had returned?

He let his attention drift back to the water, his gaze drawn inevitably to the epicentre of the ripples. The unease he had felt at the bird’s call disappeared like mist on a hot summer morning as he watched the source of the disturbance move closer.

The sun scattered its rays recklessly from the upset surface of the loch, and the ripples now came in faster to the bank, throwing themselves at the legs of the reeds in childish imitation of violence. The splashing made his horse move restlessly. It was a large creature, accustomed to hard rides over long distances, and it had little patience for this waiting game. It arched its proud neck and chewed the bit, but the rider simply sat still and light in the saddle, his attention not to be diverted.

He narrowed his dark eyes against the rhythmic flashing of light on wet skin and water, trying to identify the area where the swimmer’s head must be. It seemed to the horseman that sun and loch had conspired to draw a veil between them, concealing all but the wake and the wash. He thought it typical that this man should collude with his surroundings in such a way as to wring his curiosity to its limits.

They were not more than twenty yards apart before two pale arms could be seen sweeping through the green water, and the sun withdrew its glare to reveal its golden imitator, soft wet curls darkened, billowing below surface, then clasping to the head as it emerged for breath.

Francis Crawford of Lymond ducked his face once more beneath the water before emerging with a modest splash and a surprising smile. He trod the clear lake, his limbs coloured by mottled greens and yellows as they moved gently below the surface. Rather than a sickly pallor, this seemed to give him a verdant strength, like an ancient folk deity, puckish and winning.

Not waiting for the rider’s greeting, Lymond extended a glittering palm to the sky and proclaimed his welcome.

“The fo is chasit, the battle is done ceis,  
The presone broken, the jevellouris fleit and flemit;  
The weir is gon, confermit is the peis,  
The fetteris lowsit and the dungeon temit,  
The ransoun made, the prisoneris redeemit;  
The field is won, owrecomen is the fo,  
Dispuilit of the treasure that he yemit:  
_Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro_.”

The rider’s brown face was troubled like the water’s surface, his apprehensive frown slowly beaten into submission by his own smile, though this was a tighter affair than Lymond’s. His reluctant merriment did not translate to words or gesture, and he could do no more than swallow the dryness in his throat, so Lymond obliged and continued the conversation himself.

“I thought it best to come over immediately, lest you thought I needed rescuing again.”

Jerott Blyth’s parched throat closed again. He tried to gather the scattered wisps of his thoughts to respond but found he did not want to speak the first, cutting defence that came to mind. As he recalled, Lymond had not wanted the last rescue Jerott had provided him with.

He had travelled for weeks. He had not seen the hooded blue eyes that looked up at him with guarded levity for years. He would not bring that bleak time into it. If he needed to use that memory as a defence, then it would only prove that he ought not to have come after all.

“It’s good to see you, Francis.” His voice sounded strange in his own ears, as though he had not used it before, distant and more even that it ought to have been.  
Piercing blue surveyed him, amusement still on Lymond’s face, but the sharp intellect was already clearly at work, turning over this greeting and its layers. His gaze was echoed in the little clumps of speedwell nestling in the shade at the path’s edge, a blue that carelessly embarrassed the sky’s gauzy paleness. Water traced the coils of hair that clung to his neck and fine jaw, lingering close to his skin before reluctantly dropping back to the lake’s surface.

“It’s good to see you too, Jerott.”

They might have been neighbours accustomed to encountering one another in their daily routines on land and in water. Francis had not been surprised to find Jerott riding alone to his estate on an unremarkable summer morning, and Jerott had not been surprised to find Francis exercising in the cool loch, as content to needle his unexpected guest with ironic verse as if Jerott had only left St Mary’s a week ago.

Yet each surveyed the changes the other had undoubtedly accrued, their appraisal that of men accustomed to combat and duel. Jerott sized up Lymond’s happiness: more genuine than he had ever seen it, he thought, but not quite without the cares and the tensions of one who knew too many secrets, one who kept up public appearances in a time of political and religious turmoil. Yet no dark circles marred his eyes; the lines that care had scored upon his face were mellowed in company with lines of affection and pleasure; he was lean and ready for his country’s upheaval, but his colour was healthy and his movements were full of ease and grace. His age and his experience approached equanimity, and he wore both with more comfort than ever.

Francis’ eyes saw less favourable changes in his friend. Jerott’s face had an angular hunger to it, though the Mediterranean sun had deepened his colour and not left him less handsome. His rich black hair looked brittle and was struck through by a few pale threads of silver, and there was a tilt to the set of shoulders that betrayed some damage to his left side. He still looked formidable; broad chested and well-muscled; but Francis Crawford recognised the exhaustion of a man without faith when he saw it. The tension of jaw and sinew, practiced horseman’s hands light on the reins, concealing the knotted stress in his forearms. He did not wear his Chevalier’s cross, either, but a fine, if dated, silk doublet that fitted loose in places it had been designed to embrace closely.

As either man might have predicted, it was Jerott who grew uncomfortable with the silence first, shifting on some pretext of steadying his skittish horse. “Well, how have you been? How is Philippa?”

Francis laughed at the familiarity of his friend’s unease. “Shall I call up to the house and have sack and biscuits brought over? There is a great deal to discuss, and we should do so in comfort…”

Jerott permitted himself a self-deprecating snort and shook his head. “I sent no announcement, I travelled alone…”

“It is nothing. You would be welcome at St Mary’s even should opening the doors let in the floods and all the fiends of hell.”

He paused and stretched his neck and shoulders, propelling a few inches of his body from the water as he did so: narrow chest moulded with a ruthless layer of muscle, each tendon visible as he arched his neck. Jerott saw the scars on his body above and below the water: they blended with the play of light so that once more he seemed joined with the loch, wound about in its tendrils.

“I think I shall make my own way back to the house, if you do not mind. Water would soil that saddle cloth beyond belief,” Lymond turned to face the fortress, now revealing the criss-cross scars on his back. He twisted around to address his guest, “I shall meet you in the parlour. Philippa is away at present, but you’ll be welcomed and watered until I arrive — and thereafter.”

With that, he ducked his head below the surface and swept the clear loch aside with his limbs, an ethereal silhouette that Jerott followed with his eyes until sunlight once more eclipsed the swimmer’s body.

 _This was a mistake_. The — twice — former Knight of the Grand Cross of Malta felt his jaw lock in seething discomfort.

He had returned to St Mary’s to prove something to himself. What he needed to prove he would barely admit within his innermost thoughts. His very self was on trial, and he was damned with guilt when left with his own mind. He had intended to correct his memory and banish this misunderstanding with an invigorating dose of reality. What better antidote to the Francis Crawford whom he had begun to think of constantly than Francis Crawford himself, in all his stubborn, infuriating, mercurial actuality?

It had started, he supposed, as a longing for conversation with one who understood him and all his frustrations. With an eloquent wit who often articulated what Jerott could not put into speech so swiftly. All of Malta rang with the memories of his last campaign there. It was a place suffused with humiliation when he looked back and recognised what Francis had seen at the time. He would find himself wondering whether his ignorance in those years could really be forgiven. Francis became his yardstick, not merely a hero at whose shoulder he could stand, but a source of faith, a warmth in his chest, a private shrine before which he laid his offerings. This was, of course, an easier exercise when one was many thousands of miles from Francis himself, with all his stubborn prickles.  
So if he had taken comfort in recourse to memories of a good friend, and confidence when he considered what tactics that talented friend would advise, it was no more than any man would do who had served under such a leader as Crawford of Lymond, the Comte de Sevigny.

But what tactics had he to consider when recovering in a harsh-walled cell in Stamboul? Jerott had been on-board ship at what was generously referred to as the battle of Djerba; he recalled something more like a tightening net of weapons and vessels, crushing an astonished, out-matched Christian fleet in its bonds. Then captured, taken once more to the centre of the Ottoman Empire — streets, smells, sounds again filled with the memories of Lymond and his past — and held until the Turk decided what his fate was.

Too old, too experienced a Knight, to be persuaded to become a janissary; too unimportant to be a bargaining chip; too healthy to be set free; too injured to be put to work. He had been ransomed as part of de Sande’s party, but only after an indeterminate time in which he had had no company but his own memories.  
The solitude was less about torture than ambivalence; his captors let him heal without enthusiasm, fed him out of obligation, and spoke to him with disinterest. It had been as though they were waiting to see whether he would eventually speak up and demand freedom and justice, or preach to them of the Christian God and his salvation, the way the other prisoners did. He was an object of idle speculation, perhaps broken in faith, but not ripe for conversion. In the face of this treatment, Jerott retreated sullenly into thoughts of a time when he had fought with meaning and passion. When he had loved what he had fought for and had not hesitated to preserve it at all costs.

The long blue nights were full of rough surfaces and threatening sounds. The thoughts of women that had once sustained him seemed either grotesquely naïve — his dear Elizabeth — or cruelly mocking — Marthe, who he believed would have laughed to see him rot in an Ottoman cell. Bereft of anything soft or kind, a man who thrived on his relationships, on winning praise and affection from those whose opinion he cherished.

He had clung to the stony ground like a shipwrecked sailor holding to a piece of driftwood. Like a man dragging another’s deadweight from the depths, his aching arm the only thing keeping the other’s head above the surface. He thought of the times he had made a difference, and he longed to have confirmation that any of it had mattered. In his dreams, Lymond’s body tried to slip away from him, into the warm Mediterranean and the slick French river water. Jerott gripped fast to it and closed his eyes, and let himself take reassurance wherever he could find it in that long captivity.

Free, in Malta, once more under the lapis eye of Heaven, exposed on white rock and exhausted with the effort of regaining his strength, those thoughts revealed themselves to be abhorrent. Jerott had reeled with disgust at himself; denied the crisis of his belief; and flung himself into training like the fatherless, lovelorn boy he had first been when he joined the Knights. He massaged the memories of the prison into something less daunting, assuring himself that it had been Marthe whose face he had dreamed of, and choosing not to respond to the unanswered letters that had waited for news of him in the years since his capture at Djerba.

He was besieged by a longing that he did not want to understand, and a loneliness that he had never been well equipped to deal with.

When the island was surrounded by the Ottoman fleet — again — it had given him strange relief: they would take no prisoners this time, and the whole place would be razed to the ground, and he would finally be able to lay down his weapons and stop defending himself against the treacherous desire in his own breast. But Jerott Blyth still did not know how to surrender, and he found himself alive at the end of months of dust and smoke and blood, a survivor of the Great Siege of Malta, a hero who had helped to secure Christendom and humiliate the great army of Dragut. And despite it all, hollow and frustrated, dissatisfied by all he did and did not do.

He had taken de Valette’s offer of a diplomatic mission to France, and both had known that he would leave the Knights Hospitaller for a second time.

So he had continued north, drawn no longer by the curiosity that had taken him there all those years ago, not following a lodestar or a promise. He went with the familiar ache of love in his body, knowing that love was a parasite that drained him. He was a meagre vessel pouring its contents into a vast ocean, losing himself to something indifferent and wonderful. It was how love had always been for him, and it would ever be so.

He wished, though, that it did not again insist on being so crudely corporeal. He had loved a man, and desired to make him his leader. He had not ever expected to desire _him_. He had hoped to explain that away as the result of a long period without female company — in his Langue, in that jail. It had not been exorcised by any of the pleasant brothels between the Mediterranean and the Forth though; mindful of his uniform, he made himself wait until he had written to Valette and changed into the civilian clothes he had picked up at Lyons. The outfit of a former life, the dress of a married merchant: respectable, acceptable, oblivious to what he truly wanted.

He visited a house that had sustained him through that marriage and all its unsatisfactory nights, hoping, perhaps, to pick up threads that he had severed. To behave as the young widower ought to have behaved back then. Then, dumbly, he had noticed the blonde boy giggling by the bar. The boy saw his single, surreptitious glance, and no amount of embarrassed, raging denial could avert the devil’s pursuit of Jerott’s custom. Of course, despite his persistence, a young thing like that could not manage to overcome the reach of a soldier’s defence, and Jerott held him at bay with wild, ungentle panic.

Reeling in the aftermath of the tussle, Jerott discovered that his interest in the female occupants of the establishment had been extinguished by the performance. Appalled by himself, he could do no more than stagger out into the street pursued by the madam’s curses and the jeers of the women and the boys. Furious, he had emptied the contents of his stomach into the gutter and promptly returned to his lodgings to discover a jug of undiluted wine with which to replace them.

God, what a state of affairs — and yet God had nothing to do with it.

 _Had He ever?_ wondered Jerott morosely, turning his horse towards St Mary’s and holding it to a sedate walk. He closed his eyes under the sun’s tentative warmth and tried to summon a vision of his wife’s face. Instead, Francis Crawford gave him an obliging smirk.

* * *

The furnishings were exquisite; the wine, defying both belief and customs regulations, was Spanish; and there was no trace of St Mary’s history as a barracks in either the parlour or the halls that led there. Jerott sat cushioned deep in a high-backed chair by the open window, listening to the conversation of the blackbirds in the thorn bushes. His small pack was in a guest room that seemed half the size of his Langue’s dining hall, his horse was stabled and fed, and he had begun to feel rested from his journey. He paced his sips of the sweet wine carefully, counting between mouthfuls when he had to, until his shaken sensibilities were soothed also, and he had almost forgotten the strength of feeling that had brought him there.

Lymond thus timed his entrance to perfection, slipping into the room when Jerott was at ease and joining him in the opposite seat with a nod and a lift of his glass. He wore clothing that was elegant without being intimidating: not his newest, most fashionable cut, but something a little older, a little frayed at the elbows, that he might wear on an informal family turn about the gardens.

“You have been shown your room?”

Jerott managed a familiar grin. “It’s palatial. You could billet the French army in there.”

“I’d ask you to keep my plans from my brother. He would not stand to hear there were Catholic forces in the household.”

“It’s that bad?”

“That depends on what your definition of the term is. Richard has at last found a cause to throw himself wholly behind, and I do my best to support him in finding a way forward that does not result in civil war. Thus far, we are managing well enough.”

“And the young Queen?”

Lymond cleared his throat and lowered the portcullis of his golden lashes. “I think, perhaps, the politics might wait until tomorrow, at least,” he addressed the fine-stemmed glass in his hand and took a sip.

“Well if I cannot ask what you have been occupied with, then what about Philippa? Does the Comtesse flourish?” Jerott heard his own voice, light and cheerful, and felt as though some unseen hand had forced itself into his back and now plucked and pulled at his organs in order to manipulate his speech.

Francis smiled wickedly. “That is also a political question. She does, yes. And the children. She has taken them to visit grandmother, who will feed them rich food and let them play with unsuitable pets.” For a moment, he held onto the words that followed, a shadow of old guardedness restraining his tongue. There were matters which he did not want to discuss with Jerott that day, but he had not assigned this as one of them. And Jerott of all his friends deserved honesty on this particular matter.

“She is accompanied by Kuzúm.”

The skin on Jerrot’s jaw tightened and his brown eyes looked pained. Despite his sober intentions, he took a second sip of wine quite soon after the one he had just swallowed.

“How old is he?”

“In his teens. About the age Philippa was when she first met him.”

“Christ,” Jerott stared at the carpet. It was patterned with elaborate knot-work and the non-pictorial patterns favoured by Islamic artists. It might have come from the Sultan’s palace itself. “He must be old enough to see a resemblance now…”

It was Francis’ turn to tense, and his response immediately closed down Jerott’s speculation. “You will have to determine that when you meet him yourself.”  
Jerott blushed, ashamed that he had been unable to keep the thought to himself, but annoyed with Francis’ delicacy on the subject. The recollection of the child’s origins — or possible origins — still stirred the embers of an old fury in him. He was not sure he wanted to see the child and be reminded over and again of the pain inflicted by Gabriel Reid Mallett.

“I am teaching him how to defend himself, without causing lasting physical harm, when he is inevitably questioned on the details of his parenthood,” Francis continued.

“And should he decide to thank you for this by addressing your own role in the circumstances?”

The return gaze was cool. “We have talked through the events; you may be surprised to hear. I decided that, in light of my own tangled heritage and the pain its secrecy necessitated, a little honesty might improve the outlook for my family.”

Genuinely caught unawares, Jerott inclined his head and accepted the whip-smart heat Francis’ retort occasioned. He knew only something of the ‘tangled heritage’, and that it was bound up with some hurt done to Philippa, as well as to his own wife’s death in Northumbria. This was enough for him to be certain that he did not want to delve into it. Tarnish and shame and a history that Lymond preferred to forget: no, Jerott was happy to let that lie as still as the earth over Marthe’s grave. Caring, in previous years, for the family pedigree had brought him nothing but loss and frustration.

“I was sorry to hear about Sibylla. In your letter.” It was a letter Jerott had received only after his ransom, and he had never replied to it. If this fact occurred to Francis, or if he had any special feelings regarding it, it did not show in his expression. “I realise I had thought she might go on forever. Always at Midculter, cutting you and Richard down to size.”

Lymond smiled wanly. “Yes. She thought so, too. She hoped to arrange our affairs right up to her final repose, but she had to be content with the affectionate reconciliation of her sons and their firstborns.”

Francis was the one to gesture for the wine to be refilled, and for some time they simply sat in easy silence, their peace threaded together by the birdsong in the garden and the sound of a brook merrily racing down towards the loch.

“Did you visit the grave?” Francis murmured at last.

Jerott blinked away the simplicity of the silence and sighed. “No. I came straight here. I visited the house in Blois but didn’t go in.” He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with one palm, wishing happy memories of Marthe would come to mind and save him from the rare kindness in Francis’ expression. “I thought I might go on imagining her living there, telling fortunes and swindling the local merchants out of their wares.”

Francis, who knew that Marthe would never have settled contentedly with such a small existence, let Jerott have his vision, but also tried to guide him to the other half of closure. “You should visit. Not today. But while it is summer. Kevin and Kuzúm took the young ones down there to plant flowers. She remains riotous and golden and impossible to ignore.”

Like a veil being lifted, Francis’ words seemed to reveal the image that he had struggled long to bring to mind. Jerott saw her as she had been before they married: proud, exquisite, infuriatingly self-satisfied and scented with orange blossom. Her skin shone under the gibbous moon, pale as the marble of ancient ruins, her eyes glittering with the cruel, old light of the stars. God, she had been beautiful, he recalled.

Something seemed to give way in his chest, as though he had received a body blow unprepared. Jerott let his head drop to a supporting hand and held tightly to the wine glass with his other fist. He remembered her standing shoulder to shoulder with her unacknowledged brother, the two of them fierce as lions, with Jerott feeling like the hopelessly confused prey animal. He knew — had known all that time ago — that both were precious to him.

Marthe, with her fine brows, paler than Francis’; the slight almond upsweep of her eyes; her cupid-bow lips framing a mouth less wide than her brother’s and her face rounder and more feminine. Francis, whose broken nose had somehow healed in a manner that only emphasised the delicacy of his bone structure; whose expressive eyes were the blue of the night sky, without the cold, fey light of Marthe’s. They were alike, but different in so many ways when one thought about it. He loved each one.

He shuddered once, with a silent sob, when the weight of another’s touch landed on his arm, just above the hand that held his glass. Francis stood at the side of the chair, his own stare thrown out through the window, scanning the fields and hills in the distance. He gripped the restless muscles of Jerott’s forearm, half-expecting to hear the soft crack of a glass-stem breaking, but the only sound in the room was his friend’s shallow, furiously controlled breathing.

To Jerott it felt as though a branding iron were boring into his flesh. When he had blinked away the excess moisture in his eyes and swallowed down the bubbling grief inside his chest, he raised his drinking arm with a sharp, pointed movement that shrugged off Francis’ hand. The best part of a glass of wine filled his mouth, quick and reckless as it sought out all corners of taste and burned powerfully down the back of his throat.

Francis stood where he had been, his glass now cradled in his two long-fingered hands, his eyes lost in the middle distance within the room. This was what he had wanted, was it not? To bring Jerott Blyth home and to make him face his past as Lymond had done. To make him acknowledge that what he wanted, what he needed and what he was best at were all here in Scotland, and not to be found in Malta or Brazil or France. He did allow the irony of this plan to tug at one corner of his mouth, but if fate had allowed Jerott to pull Francis Crawford back from his foolishness on uncountable occasions, then surely it could concede to Francis Crawford one gesture in return.

He had never asked. Never, _never_ asked. Jerott had stayed with him in Scotland. He had trailed him across the continent with an obstinate teenage girl in tow and he had picked up Francis’ motives and followed his instructions without hesitation. He had pulled him from sea and river, matched him in arrow-shot and a race across rooftops, and he had finally, excruciatingly, conceded to Francis’ one desire…and in doing so had sealed the loss of all that Jerott Blyth worshipped. Afterwards, Francis had buried himself in the bliss of love that had been denied too long while Jerott had fled the shores in haste, unable to face the happy consequences of his actions.

Once he had chosen to stay with Francis, Jerott had simply always been there. Until he had not.

With a glance at the servants, Lymond drained his glass and injected brightness into his voice. “I believe that lunch is served. Come, Jerott. At St Mary’s, you will recall, we are a sober and a disciplined house, and we always eat before opening the second cask of liquor.”

Jerott looked up, dark eyes red-rimmed, but blazing with something that almost made Francis take a step back. Then he sniffed discreetly and gave a tight-lipped smile. “Do you remember that ridiculous food in Baden? I never even got to try that stuff.”

“All to the better; if you will also recollect, it was certainly laced with opium. We ought to have cast all of Master Zitwitz’s concoctions to the dung-heap.”  
By the time they had reached the dining table their laughter rippled and overlapped. They circled the holes of lost persons and political delicacies and reminded one another of common interests and shared acquaintances. A second cask was indeed opened, and the food far surpassed that offered by Onphrion Zitwitz, in Baden or elsewhere.

* * *

Through the short summer night, Jerott sat on the edge of his bed, flask in one hand, glass in the other. He drank slowly, to make the wine last until dawn, and when it was finished and he had thoughtfully swilled the last mouthful over his tongue, he stood with purpose, placed the vessels down, and packed his neatly hung clothes.

He fastened his cuffs and his doublet and lifted the pack. His weapons and overcoat were in the stable, and his horse would be fresh and well-rested. He could leave now and be far gone before any questions caught up with him.

Through the fog of wine and sleeplessness, he closed his eyes and swayed for a moment, thinking with a lurch of nausea of the previous night’s conversation. Undoubtedly things had been said that should not have been uttered, but his mind shied away from identifying them.

To no avail. They rose to the surface, pressing on towards him like a pale body through green water.

Lymond had wanted to know who spoke of him still at the French court; the question had piqued Jerott, not least because he had an answer to satisfy his host’s curiosity.

“They all do. There is universal lamentation that you stay at home happily wed and no longer join them in their entertainments. They suspect you of being a Calvinist though, and say that Condé has met you for secret trysts, and that Philippa loves a Spanish ambassador.”

With each revelation, Lymond’s brows had risen higher, until they were near-hidden by the curls covering his forehead. He burst into joyous laughter. “Condé! I would wager Condé himself spreads those rumours. My, but the French court is sadly out of touch these days.”

“Naturally I assumed the Spanish ambassador was one of your disguises,” Jerott had said flatly.

“Not recently. There was a Spaniard at Mary’s court, I think he found his way to Edinburgh once or twice since then. But we have no need of securing information by those means anymore. _Aime qui vouldra_ …it is much more pleasant to make love out of love rather than to bargain for secrets.”

“Indeed. What a revelation for you.” Jerott had not intended for the acidic reply to fall so seriously from his lips, and he drank deeply so as to avoid seeing Lymond’s answering expression.

Nonetheless, he had caught a glimpse, just before Lymond drained his own glass, of narrow, distasteful scrutiny.

That half-seen expression haunted him in the weak morning light. He thought of the scent of spikenard and the eyes of the Aga Morat, weighty with a lust Jerott had failed to comprehend. Whatever Lymond had done…

He had done for Jerott. To protect him from something he still found unconscionably awful even as he seemed to catch himself wanting something like it for himself.

Jerott retched drily over the chamber pot before walking stiff-legged to the open window and sticking his head out into the damp air. His shoulders pressed uncomfortably against the stone sill and he tried to imagine where else he might go when he left St Mary’s.

Anywhere, of course. He was not barred from Russia, loved and hated in France, unwelcome on Malta, a figure of suspicion in England and Ireland. But Lymond was in none of those places, and so they seemed grey and purposeless paths to him. The unknown bored him; what was Brazil if he could not witness Lymond’s responses to all that Villegaignon had discovered? He could find the other men of Lymond’s troop; he had heard something about Danny Hislop going to Austria. Simplicity had been Jerott’s guiding principle for so long that he did not know how to choose between all the equally unsatisfactory options open to him. Simplicity offered only one future: to do as he had always done.

He closed his eyes and let the sense that the tower was reeling around him pass. Cool, wet air filled his lungs and dewdrops clung to his hair and eyelashes. Jerott inhaled the powdery smell of the stone, the sharp, clear sense of the loch below, and the sounds of stirring animals. Was he not a man of discipline, trained and honed his whole life for the following of orders and the carrying out of the impossible? He could serve a man he loved and seek nothing more than the pleasure of doing so. If Lymond had whored himself out to save Jerott, how could Jerott object to making a sacrifice far less compromising? The desire that he felt would fade. He had raged his way through unfulfilled desires before, and he knew that the burning resentment did not last. For now, his thoughts might curve again and again to: cornflower blue eyes, delicate, clever hands and all that they could do, the texture of muscle and bone beneath the irregularly freckled chest and shoulders, pale new curls embracing silken earlobes. But this hunger would consume itself with imagined scenarios and then reduce, exhausted, like a fire without fuel.

He opened his eyes and looked at the water below. The decision had been made: he left his room, moving silently and with purpose through the corridors and down to the kitchen. With a nod to a bleary-eyed cook, he slipped past tables laden with goods to be prepared and left the castle through the servant’s door, trotting lightly down the wooden stair before lengthening his stride as he crossed the muddy yard. Not knowing precisely where he was going, and blanching momentarily at what he first thought was a whipping post, but turned out to be a bean-pole, he meandered through low-walled enclosures and kitchen gardens, seeking out the edge of the loch.

He breathed deeply at the chill air that lay heavy above the water, and shook his shirt-clad arms to warm them and to gather his determination. A wild euphoria spread through him, from the soles of his feet upwards, as he looked across the slumbering surface of the loch and thought of a future beyond his current, obsessive want, where he could serve happily at Lymond’s side for years to come: trusted friend, soldier and comrade.

Jerott unfastened his doublet and threw it down on the pebbly shore with uncharacteristic disorderliness. A grin lit his face when the morning grasped his ribcage with its cool hands, and he flung his shirt over his head too, allowing the air’s caress to pucker his skin and excite all the small hairs on his body.

The mist on the loch hid most of the surrounding shores, and only the odd lazy curve of water suggested the rumour of waterfowl further out. The dawn landscape belonged to him and him alone, as he now flexed bare feet on the smooth pebbles and worked at his hose fastenings. If the nape of his neck tingled then he put it down to the atmosphere’s dewy fingers raking their way through his hair.

With hose and underclothes cast off, Jerott took short, purposeful steps to the water’s edge, laughing silently at the loch’s coy undulations.

He hissed through his teeth as the cold water covered his feet and worked its way between his toes. His hands flexed automatically and he made himself stand, controlling his rapid breathing, until his skin had accepted the water’s touch. Step by step, he moved forward, alternately gasping and chuckling at the sensation, drawing on all he had been trained in and all he had endured in order to master the wild panic of his heart and the defensive tightening of his chest.

When the water reached the tops of his thighs he paused, legs planted apart to steady himself, fingertips dipped speculatively in the restless surface to his sides. He glanced up at the tower of St Mary’s keep, a grey block with dark, small windows that seemed to rise from the loch mist. The distant threat of sunshine dappled the glass on the uppermost apertures but otherwise all was calm monochrome.

Jerott took a deep breath and stepped onwards.

He kept his feet on the slimy floor of the loch until its surface reached his chin and his body seemed to belong to another time and place. His arms looked paler beneath the green filter, making him seem less suited to the environment than Lymond had been. But the water held him just as kindly as it had held the swimmer yesterday, and Jerott closed his eyes and leaned his head back to the white sky, letting the loch comb his shoulder-length hair and sooth his scalp. His head and face disappeared below the surface, and he let all the heat and shame within him float upwards, like a fox discarding its fleas on a scrap of wool. Beneath the water, he was free of his love’s burning demands, and saw it cool and pure: the thing that had made him grab Richard’s reins to let Austin fire; the apology he had finally thought to murmur when he saw the bedraggled body he had hauled from the river at Dourlans; the grim knowledge that he could do nothing for his love except set it free.

He emerged with a gush of water and a gasp that startled a bird into noisy flight in the mist nearby. The air felt sweeter and warmer after that cold underworld and Jerott finally pushed off the loch-floor with his toes, letting his body rise and his arms work out to chase the water’s embrace, pursuing it to the centre of St Mary’s Loch.

He was a strong swimmer, but the loch stretched itself out along several miles of hills and uplands. He contented himself with swimming until the sun’s rays had banished the mist to the edges of the water and brought blushes of colour back to the world, when he lay on his back and let the loch lap at the island he made. Far from any who might comment on the tunefulness of his rendition, he hummed a ballad that seemed to fit his mood and basked in the warmth that had begun to evaporate the moisture on his bare skin. It reminded him of the feeling of lying disrobed on a lover’s bed, feeling his sweat dry rough and salty, pleasantly lulled by the sense that he had, at that moment, no wants at all in the world.

By the time he began his return the shores had become green and bright once more, and the granite pele tower glittered victoriously. At its base could now be seen a pier, with thin wooden legs rising on each side, extending to the deeper water of the loch.

Jerott relaxed into the oblivious rhythm of the stroke, feeling the synchronicity of breath and body as his shoulders rotated together and the fresh water let him nuzzle his face over and again into its accommodating form. His surroundings were irrelevant until he felt himself in the cooler water in the direct shade of the keep.

Between breaths, it seemed, a figured had appeared, seated at the end of the pier. A moss green, embroidered kaftan concealed all between the golden head and the pale feet, one of which dangled over the edge of the pier, held tantalisingly above the water.

Lymond awaited Jerott’s approach, as Jerott had watched for Francis the previous day. Sitting by his side on the pier was a tall silver pot and two vessels. His expression, even when Jerott was close enough to see it, was impassive and unreadable, his eyes hooded and his mouth a straight, serious line.

Jerott let his legs lower and shook the strands of his black hair back, rubbing a hand over his face as he looked up at Lymond. Yesterday, from his horse, he had felt like a lost knight of Arthur encountering some strange river spirit; today the tables were turned, but he was still the mystified supplicant, looking up at the fairy shore he needed permission to gain.

Francis’ gaze dropped from his eyes to his torso and he spoke with dispassionate observation: “Had the Turk been more generous with his hospitality that might have healed straight.”

How could those mere words, spoken in so unfeeling a manner, warm Jerott as though he had swallowed burning coal all of a sudden? His nerves twanged, from his throat to his groin, under that cornflower blue stare.

“I rarely feel it,” he said hoarsely. The injury that had ended his capacity to resist at Djerba had left a dark pink weal of skin on his ribcage, uneven and puckered at the edges, but not really tight enough to restrict his movement. Or not so much that most people would notice.

Francis still seemed to be looking directly at it, but his eyes had lost focus a little, as though he were really seeing something much further away.  
Jerott took renewed confidence from the silence. “You knew then, about Djerba.”

Francis’ lips parted a little and he blinked, but did not move to meet Jerott’s eye. “Not immediately, though I had my suspicions when my epistles were no longer acknowledged. It was Danny Hislop, actually, who heard of a man of your description languishing in a pit in Stamboul, naming neither patron nor deity in his favour, though he had clearly been a knight of some valour. De Busbecq was little interested in your release until I explained to him your importance.”

His body dipped momentarily, as his limbs forgot their movement. Jerott sputtered on loch-water and stared wide-eyed up at his buyer, his customary anger mixed with stinging embarrassment.

“Please, Jerott, spare me the protestations,” Francis instructed, pinning him with blue again. “I was permitted, for more than several months, to think you dead in that foolish expedition. And what a waste it seemed.” His lip curled bitterly.

“I wondered whether you had felt the same, when you thought you had let me die at Austin’s hand: what a waste. But there was no Austin Grey for me to empty my armoury on. Getting close enough to wring the neck of dear Phillip would have proved something of a challenge.”

This speech silenced Jerott utterly, but he kept low in the water, bobbing with a red-faced glower on the dark surface.

“A spear, or some kind of pike, jabbed down. You were unarmoured. In the sea,” Lymond raised his brows questioningly, but Jerott saw no need to confirm or deny these —infuriatingly accurate —speculations.

“How many did you save?”

“Too few.”

Francis poured _kahveh_ into the two crystal and silver filigree vessels and held one dark, steaming portion out to Jerott, who accepted it with his arm dripping lake water. He held onto the pier at Lymond’s feet with his other hand and drank with a sullen eye on the shadow of the tower shifting across the water’s surface.

“I did not realise you would leave Scotland so soon after the burial. What did you think you could achieve?”

Jerott gulped down the bitter liquid, still flushed with feeling. “In God’s name, what was there to keep me here, Francis?” He reached across and thumped the empty cup down on its silver tray with a sound that offended the peace all around the lakeshore.

Lymond’s serene, sardonic expression flickered momentarily with annoyance. “A future to fight for, instead of a past.”

Jerott grasped the rough wood of the pier to either side of Francis’ dangling leg and levered himself up with white fingertips and a menacing intent. “A future for you,” as he snapped the words, water dripped from him onto the hem of the green silk kaftan, leaving dark bleeding wounds on the delicate fabric. “For you, Francis. My future was dead. I nearly killed all I loved that day.”

He let his body down into the water without care, and the loch supported him, covering his retreat by rising and splashing at Francis’ foot and clothing. Lymond did not move, but held Jerott’s furious stare as if to see whether he would take his words back, or stammer to change their implication.

Jerott reddened right down to the top of his chest, swelling with the quick breath of emotion. “Killed nearly all,” he fulfilled Francis’s prediction in a hollow tone, then turned with a kick of water and began to swim away.

“Where will you go, Jerott?” Francis called after him, watching his body undulate through the water, graceful and yet ridiculous at the same time. “ _Paroist-il que j’aye autre visaige que le mien acoustumé?_ ” he muttered at the sight of the muscled, pale mounds of Jerott’s buttocks powering him across the loch.

It had been the sort of declaration that might have turned his stomach with fear as a younger man, wary of the possessiveness of love. A decade and a half earlier he had recoiled from the severity of Robin Stewart’s attentions, but Jerott was no Robin Stewart. Second only to Philippa and family — no, he _was_ family, had made himself so even before marrying Lymond’s sister — and decidedly missed these past years. Francis had believed him lost once, and he could not allow the thought of this man going to waste on someone else’s war again.

With a sort of pleasurable exasperation, Francis pulled off the water-stained kaftan and flung it on the pier. Taking a step or two back he made a lithe movement towards the water and then dove in, following Jerott at speed. The dive gave him the momentum to push through the other man’s wake, and Francis managed to grasp one slippery ankle, holding tight as Jerott kicked and twisted, turning with a cascade of water and a shout.

“Where will you go?” Francis demanded, releasing his catch with a flourish so that Jerott could not position himself to kick out again.

His arms thrown out to the sides, he shook the water from his hair and face and glared at Francis with white hot fury. “I’ve been bought and paid for, haven’t I? I go where you instruct.”

“My God, I must ask the Sultan whether he accepts returned goods.” He ducked the wild punch — Jerott had rarely been brave enough to truly aim for him — and cupped his hand to splash his foe in the face.

“ _Hell!_ ” Jerott spat, and punched the water between them instead, covering Francis with a spray of green lakewater.

Francis grinned and slapped the churning loch’s surface again, repeating the gesture with each sentence: “France? Russia? I have contacts. Go east, after Polo, evangelise to the men of Cathay with your Portuguese brothers? Or perhaps you need to go further. Take your sword to Ultima Thule, to Wineland the Good! To Saint Brendan’s Island, where you will never want for grapes.”

Few things outside his marriage gave Francis Crawford such pleasure as making Jerott Blyth squirm with discomfort. It was a sport he had missed; one of the only things life in Scotland had been lacking. It raised a healthy colour to Jerott’s face, and an honest combination of dislike and desire to his expression.

Between blinking back the spray, Jerott’s dark eyes were raging, all his self-possession and carefully earned arrogance kept at bay by the merest of childish gestures. Again and again, Francis suggested far-flung and mythical lands in his lightest, honey-sweet tone, barely flinching as Jerott flailed in his attempts to splash his assailant back.

“I was going to stay,” he finally roared, sputtering on the lakewater in his mouth.

Francis let his arm relax, returned to stillness, floating in the restless waves he had created. He looked at Jerott with peaceful inscrutability again, as though none of the previous moment’s mania had been real. Jerott stared back at him, wild-eyed and ruffled, breathing heavily and stinging all over with the sparkling blows of the water and his pride flogged raw.

“I should like to stay.” His voice was husky, and it took all his considerable effort to hold his stare steady with Lymond’s, but it was worth it to see, brought by those familiar words, rare blossoms of red on Francis’s cheeks.

“I am glad.”

They trod water together, barely an arm’s length apart, men who had spent more time of their lives separate than united, but who had never really needed to ask the other a direct question when it mattered. The sun lit the golden hair and the black, and from the shore the ripples their commotion had caused conspired with the light to draw a veil over them. For each man, it was once again a world in which anything seemed possible.


	2. The prisoneris redeemit

He had not asked for it. Never would have. He did not know how to. And though he had wanted it, tried to imagine it, tried not to imagine it, the movement was a shock, and instinct made him flinch.

Jerott blocked the outreached arm, sending an arc of lake water up between him and Francis. The surface that had only recently settled again swirled around their bodies, attack and defense flowing with their surroundings, until Francis got the upper hand because Jerott could not fully believe what was happening.

Francis pinned one of his arms down so that Jerott had to work with the other to stay afloat, and Francis’ free arm was under his throat, muscles flexing like steel against the soft skin beneath Jerott’s jaw. His blue eyes were wide, with large, dark pupils, and his colour was still uneven. Jerott’s heart was thumping hard, he could not concentrate on reading the thin-lipped expression that Francis wore.

Clean and quick as a death blow, Francis moved his grip to hold Jerott’s jaw between his thumb and fingers. Secure, but not bruising, firm without being cruel, Francis left him unable to turn his head from the kiss that followed.

In blind confusion, Jerott froze, too many sensations assailing him so that he could not take in or respond to the experience. With dogged patience, Francis’s lips pressed to his, now soft, now hard, then parting to graze Jerott’s stubbornly locked mouth with his teeth so that, with an aching gasp, Jerott finally released the breath he had been holding, and Francis’s tongue made its way obstinately inside him, searching, soothing, softening his resistance.

He tasted of the bitter _kahveh_ that Jerott had forgotten he had just had. The drink’s flavours were entirely new when mingled with the taste of Francis’s mouth: fresher, sweeter and more perfumed.

Jerott also noticed that there was water in his ear, a pain in his shoulder from some ill-advised movement in the combat, and that the cold was seeping into his extremities from so long in the loch. These distractions grew more pronounced as he struggled and failed to make sense of the kiss — and how pleasant it was, how easily their mouths matched each other. The fear of acknowledging how much he wanted this drove thought from his mind and feeling from his lips, so that he soon could not sense anything but the discomfort in the rest of his body.

Just as firmly, Francis ended the kiss and extended his arm before releasing Jerott, so that he had the space to respond to any answering move.

His dumbstruck foe was out of counter gestures though. Jerott’s astonished eyes rested on Francis’s features without really seeing the way colour had picked its way drunkenly across the pale cheeks and brow, the way Francis’s tongue now crept along the inside of his lips to prolong the taste of the kiss.

What was it for? Jerott’s numb mind buzzed with the question, and he threw a sudden, confused glance up at the shore and the tower. There had always been an audience when Francis did things like this: people to prove a point to, family members to pacify or enrage, a patron to pique and amuse. Or, as he had said himself, it was a bargain, exchanged for something that he deemed necessary. Worth the sacrifice of his body and all it knew.

“I don’t. I didn’t. You didn’t have to,” he stammered, feeling heat concentrate in his belly and his face. Was this shock? When had he last been in shock?

If he had noticed it as his gaze darted about self-consciously, Jerott would have seen Francis’s shoulders loosen by a fraction. Francis let out a breath he had not meant to hold, sighing relief. He had not misunderstood Jerott as he had momentarily suspected; a foolish, fear-driven thought, for Francis had never once misunderstood Jerott before.

“Indeed I did not. ” Francis threw his head back to free a damp curl that stuck to his eyebrow and seemed to read Jerott's fears with precision. “What do you have to bargain with, Jerott? All Valette’s secret hopes for the preservation of the Order and the triumph of Christendom? Personal knowledge of the prayers uttered in an Ottoman jail? I do not wish to bargain with you.”

Jerott blinked. He stalled, brushing his slick hair back with a wet palm and swallowing his words two or three times. “I would stay. I was going to stay anyway,” he murmured.

The distance between them closed once more, and Francis again pressed his mouth to the other man’s lips. This time he did not seek to fix him in place, but wound an arm around Jerott’s back instead, feeling his warmth in the cold lake water; tracing a touch barely less gentle than the loch over muscled shoulders and down the groove of his spine.

Falteringly at first, as he spent too much concentration on the strangeness of the kiss, Jerott’s arms found their way to hold him in an encircling embrace, and Francis let him take their weight in the water as he had done before, in sea and in river. Jerott’s lips were coated in the fresh taste of the loch: water that remembered the cold of the winter hills and the fresh growth of spring. Then came the _kahveh_ on his tongue and the stale sweetness of wine on his teeth — Francis drank him in like a parched traveller, finally admitting to himself how long he had been curious to experience this.

In the late morning sun they emerged onto the pier, bodies sparkling with water on cold-puckered skin. They trailed tendrils of the loch with them: it struck the forgotten kaftan again, and left pools to capture the pale sky in the silver serving tray. Weaving across cracked wood and stone flags went two sets of footprints, dark smudges that began to retreat as soon as they had been laid down, so that when the men slipped away inside the tower there was already nothing but a rumour left. The moss green silk rested by the sky-white silverware, both observing the loch’s surface settle once more into calm.

* * *

Jerott flexed his toes in the thick fur of the rug beneath them. He clutched the blanket he had been handed tight about his shoulders and looked all around him with a dazed sort of wonder. The room was bright, the dome of the lime-washed ceiling like that of a Calvinist church: beam-vaulted heavens untouched by the opulence beneath. Coloured material and wood covered the walls, the exotic cloth studded with beads of glass and tiny mirrors that seemed to laugh delightedly as the morning sun fell on them. All smelled of fresh cotton and herbs, not the wood polish and incense Jerott had associated with places of worship. The room was dominated by the dark posts of the bed, but its covers and curtains were drawn back like open arms, inviting him to proceed to its rumpled white covers.

He thought, perhaps, that he ought to pray. To ask to be saved from temptation, or for Francis to be saved, or at least for some divine gust of knowledge to prepare him for what he supposed he was about to do. He could not think of a single prayer though, but the one he had heard murmured without mockery or artifice, on a dark riverbank at Dourlans.

 _Ta volonté soit faicte, je remets le tout à ta divine bonté_.

The Lord’s will that night had not given Lymond what he had sought. Instead it had presented him with Jerott Blyth, crashing through fire, stone and water like a stampeding behemoth, until he found his leader’s ragdoll body and pulled it from carnage.

Apprehensively, Jerott waited to see what the Lord’s will had in store for him now.

The shift of shadows on the bed clothes was the only sign that Francis had returned to the room. He padded, cat-footed and silent, across the patchwork of rugs and furs, emerging around the foot of the bed as a glorious monochrome statue: body silhouetted dark in front of the window, sun making a halo of his blonde curls as he tousled them with the blanket thrown unashamedly around his shoulders.

Jerott, who had seen many a man dry himself off after swims, steams, baths, soaks, falls, nevertheless felt a knot in the depths of his torso twist hard and tight at the vision. Francis stood, legs shoulder-width apart, elbows out, a perfect outline of muscle and grace. With one more step he turned a little, allowing the window to illuminate gently raised brows and a soft, quizzical smile.

“I’ve heard it said often enough that patience is the virtue of the ass,” he regarded Jerott’s response closely as he continued slow steps towards him, and, presumably, relished the way his dark skin flushed burgundy red above the cover he still held onto.

But Jerott stood his ground as Francis advanced, blue eyes fixed mercilessly on him, fingers flexing, hands raising to Jerott’s face. Once he was within reach, Jerott opened his arms and the blanket, drawing Francis inside it with him, containing that bright body close to his, skin cold and hot and fists still bunched in cloth. He was still getting used to the kisses: soft lips but hard angles, the moments of surprising friction when midday stubble met its equal. And Lymond pressed to him, on dry land, safely within the tent he had made, was a strange armful of sinew and strength, a body unlike any woman Jerott had held.

Francis, slightly taller, leaned over the face cupped between his hands, soothing skin and the soft hair that tangled around Jerott’s ears. He rolled his hips against the other man’s, sharing the heat in his groin and opening his mouth to capture Jerott’s sharp gasp. Slowly, like paper in a fire, Jerott let his fists unfurl and pressed his palms to Francis’s back. The blanket dropped without pause and Francis’s hold danced down his body after it, settling on Jerott’s buttocks with a grip nearly firm enough to bruise skin, pulling him greedily close, rocking Jerott’s own hips against his.

Learning again that this was just the skill of bodies, the practice of movement and the sense of when to be gentle and when to be forceful, Jerott let his confidence build. He pushed back into Francis’s kiss with eager insistence, running the sensitive flats of his hands over the tangled silk scar tissue of Lymond’s back. This body was an unexplored wilderness to him, familiar as though he had seen it at a distance, from a tall tower, but strange now he had reached its borders. A land of texture and heat; fine peach down hairs in the hollows of his back; the odd outcrop of a dark mole beneath Jerott’s questing fingers; a sheen of salt sweat forming between them.

He was rarely more at ease than when his body was absorbed in the rhythms of its use, whether fighting, training or riding. With Francis he felt this, but also a unity of purpose, the elation of two forms weaving together a common goal. He barely recognised the boldness of his own hands, though they worked as always with a competitive determination to excel.

Francis was half-beneath him, one knee raised, his neck cast to the heavens as Jerott left half-bitten kisses along the line of muscle running from collarbone to ear. The throaty laugh that buzzed beneath his mouth made Jerott pause though, shot through with disorienting panic. Was he being mocked again? Doing something naively incorrect? Had this, after all, been nothing but a test he had failed?

One of those long-fingered, elegant hands smoothed its way from his stilled wrist up his arm, making the hair on his skin stand on end as it travelled. Francis brought his face down for another deep, thirsty kiss and Jerott felt the hot movement of Francis’s pleasure against his palm. Yet rather than allow him to resume the strokes he had been making, Francis held Jerott still and gave another dry laugh.

“I appreciate the effort, Jerott, but I am in no hurry.”

Jerott, who had grown grimly used to his wife’s careless, dutiful attitude, puzzled at this, still suspecting he had made some mistake.

Cornflower blue, coquettish behind wheat-gold lashes, smiled up at him. “That is to say, I very much enjoyed what you were doing.”

“It was good?”

Francis’s amusement was kind — a little surprised, but not cruel. “It was good,” he distracted Jerott with another kiss so as to swing his body around, twisting Jerott’s back to the bed covers and positioning himself above him, grinding their bodies together as he leaned in to nuzzle at the base of long dark hair, not quite dry.

He wanted to be generous, but he wanted to assert his knowledge of possibilities that Jerott had not yet imagined. He still wanted to tease, but only the physical at this moment: to this end, Francis brought Jerott to a cliff-edge with his mouth, letting him think he had control of himself. Then he eased his movements, felt the taut body beneath him relax a little, and proceeded to do the same again.

At first, when he realised what Francis was doing so deliberately, Jerott let out a hiss of air between his teeth. Francis’s glance up revealed black brows crumpled low, eyes screwed shut, teeth gritted, as Jerott struggled to hold himself together.

A few flickers of Francis’s tongue would put an end to that. He inched Jerott closer to that precipice, closer, his hips shivering beneath Francis’s hands, until he had to breathe and cry out the name of the man who had him in his power. The word snapped out, tight as a sail catching the wind, and Francis retreated again, softening, soothing, a smug glint in his eye as Jerott repeated his name, now quiet, a prayer for mercy.

He was not inclined to feel merciful on seeing that proud, handsome face painted with a flush of heat, the broad chest rising and falling rapidly with shallow breathing. A respite, perhaps, but no mercy for one who had been in love with Francis for years and not known how to admit it to himself. Who, even now, had not demanded to place a hold on the object of his fascination, who had hoped to hide his own desire, submersing his secret in the centre of the loch so that he could return to Francis’s side without resentment.

Francis had, through his whole life, been excruciatingly aware of the way in which other people’s assumptions were mapped onto him: he was a blank page of possibility to men and women around the courts of the known world. When he had first been reunited with Jerott, there had been one more fantasy of himself to wear, one in which he was both degenerate whore and potential saviour. He had little real hope of countering this view until Jerott had surprised him and agreed to stay in Scotland.

Then Jerott had begun to let each illusion fall from his eyes through that long year they had shared on the edges of the Mediterranean. _You put up with a lot, you know_. Despite his distaste and despite his admiration, he had stayed. Until he relinquished all control over his hopes for Francis and tried to grant him the ending he had once so longed for.

Gratitude had made Francis nervous. It seemed an obligation, a requirement for some future return on an act of kindness. But Jerott had asked for no return.

How could he be merciful in the face of such open-handed loyalty? Francis had heard his name spoken as a word of panic and a prayer, but he needed to know if he could make Jerott ask, just once, to beg him for something it was within his powers to grant.

Oblivious to these intentions, it seemed to Jerott as though he lay suspended, balanced on the surface of the lake, constantly on the cusp of the moment when the water would claim him and draw his body under. His arms spread wide to persuade the loch to keep him afloat; his heels sought purchase against the tide of sheets. He felt detached from all except the movement of warm mouth, the pressure of thumbs on his hips, his body draining down into one point, a whirlpool of shivers and heat.

When released, temporarily, from the moment of balance, Jerott let out a deep breath and made his hands unlock their grip on the bedclothes. Shakily, they found Francis’s head, which still moved rhythmically, but produced gentle shore waves now, not the tempest of a moment ago. Jerott gulped drily at the sight when he managed to raise his head from the pillow to watch.

There was a vicious sort of generosity in it that almost made him think of Marthe; her methodical approach to his pleasure, as though he were another instrument to master — to practice when it suited her, but not a permanent matter of interest, let alone affection. Despite the undeniable expertise of what Lymond was doing, despite having supposed that such an act might be no different when performed by a man if he just kept his eyes shut and thought of another’s face, Jerott found that this was not what he wanted. He felt unaccountably distant from what was being performed on him, and caught the flash of blue when Francis looked up with a desperate look of his own.

Coaxing him away with outstretched arms, fingers twined in golden curls, Jerott gathered Francis closer, drawing him up above him with his jaw cupped between his hands. Francis’s eyes sparkled, roving over Jerott’s face and body with interest, and his wet, blushed lips appealed despite what they had been doing. He looked as though he intended to gather his breath and make some comment — in French, probably, or perhaps Italian at a time like this — so Jerott brought his face forcefully down to kiss. It was sloppy, salty, Francis’s arms rearranging themselves around them to hold himself up as Jerott’s fingers found the grooves and curves behind his ears, beneath his jaw, hidden by thickets of hair.

In acknowledgement of Jerott’s decision to end the game he had been playing, Francis rolled his hips in time with their kisses, pressing and nudging until Jerott’s hold moved lower, his hands on hips, thighs, buttocks. Francis pushed closer, and Jerott gasped at the anticipated, still unfamiliar intimacy. This wordless request gratified Francis far more than any other would have done, and though the strength of the affirmation in Jerott’s grip surprised him, it also fuelled the fire of his own want.

No such surprise at himself entered into Jerott’s mind; what he could barely have contemplated without feeling his stomach heave was now all his body seemed to crave. Vestiges of self-consciousness left him when Francis lowered his bodyweight onto Jerott’s, freeing his hands to work through Jerott’s black hair, thumbs tilting his head back so that Francis could nip the skin of his throat, neck, collarbone.

To want and be wanted; to make love out of love. He had not appreciated what this meant until it was his to experience. He felt no strangeness in Francis’s sharp body any longer, there seemed nothing untoward at the way his hair caught in the sandpaper of Francis’s cheek, or the pressure seeking its way between his legs. He could think of himself in no other place, because now there was only here, here and Francis Crawford, brilliant and flushed and laughing against Jerott’s chin and mouth with toothy kisses, here with Jerott, their bodies mirrored against each other, as right as anything he had ever believed.

* * *

Soft Scottish summer did not quite warm the skin. The breeze from the window might have been uncomfortably cool if not for the body beside him. Jerott had fallen asleep on his back, in the hollow of white covers and pillows that their weight together had made. One arm still held Francis fast, slotted in the space between his torso and biceps, so that the golden head was compelled to lie on his chest, cheek tickled by short dark hair, eyelids lulled into half-closing by the gentle rise and fall of Jerott’s breathing.

He listened to the wings of house martins outside, their rustling and chirruping activity a sign that the world and all its endeavour had not ceased in the meantime. Newly unoccupied, Francis’s thoughts returned to the customary, swirling concerns of his day to day. Fears for Mary’s will, frustration at the young queen’s naïve pride, and a deep-seated dislike of Darnley and all his ambitions troubled his mind. News of a child was imminent, and he worried that the queen would not hold out forever against Darnley’s demands for the Crown Matrimonial.

He should be at court. He should have been in attendance to see and hear all, to make sure he acted first on any developments. But Archie had brought him news of Jerott’s arrival and Philippa had taken a single look at his pale face and announced that she would go to Flaw Valleys. She had pushed him to write to de Busbecq on Danny’s information. She had recognised what he could not: when Jerott’s letters had ceased and news had dried up, he had felt it like a shrapnel wound working its way deeper inside his body. An ache that revealed itself slowly, turning to poison with regrets he had not known he harboured.

Francis swallowed stiffly, his fingers working light circles over the scar on Jerott’s side. The future balanced on a knife-edge in his mind, with so little to ensure it stayed stable. But there was brief reassurance to be drawn from the stubborn love of those around him: Philippa’s grim determination to follow him into trouble and save her questions for later; Jerott’s experienced denial of hopelessness and stoic reliability. Francis could not believe that all would be well, but he could face whatever came with more confidence.

“I can _feel_ you thinking, Francis,” Jerott’s arm shifted a little beneath him, fingers stretching to tug at the tips of golden curls nestled against Francis’s neck.

He would lie entwined with Philippa for vast moments of silence, in which they each worried in their own way about things to come. But it was not in Jerott’s character to be silent or subtle. He sighed and moved his shoulders against the pillows so that Francis had to compensate with his own body to keep the distance between them minimal, and Jerott’s arm tightened and drew him close even as he did.

“I am always thinking.”

It was impossible to know whether the noise Jerott made was one of amusement or irritation without twisting to see his face, so Francis contented himself with not knowing, and let his fingers wander from scar tissue to the line of soft hairs that grew together in a line pointing towards Jerott’s navel.

“You said politics could wait until tomorrow. Well, it is tomorrow. Tell me,” his stubbornly talkative pillow continued, though Francis pressed one ear tight to his chest in the hope of blocking out the conversation. He drew his touch lower, lighter, teasing the ticklish soft skin of Jerott’s belly.

With the unmistakable speed of combat training, Jerott’s free arm appeared from somewhere among the tangled sheets to hold Francis’s wrist and still the troublesome distraction of his fingers.

Francis regarded his captured hand in silence, comparing the strength of Jerott’s grip with the delicacy of the fingers that toyed with his hair. It made Francis’s body think immediately of better things they might do than discuss politics, and he wondered whether Jerott could not be persuaded. He turned and raised himself on his elbow to survey the expression of the man who held him with such a decisive combination of firmness and softness.

The angle of the sun betrayed the colours in Jerott’s dark eyes: warm brown, full of care, with hesitant copper highlights. He looked at Francis with a seriousness that did not quite mask his apprehension, and Francis wished suddenly, fervently not only to distract but also to soothe. If Jerott had any doubts about what they had done, Francis wanted to allay them. He leaned over to kiss him, gentle, languid, as honest with his sentiment as he could be.

It had some of the desired effect, as Jerott’s body seemed to relax a little against him. He released the wrist he held and twined his fingers between Francis’s instead, his gaze still sincere. “Tell me, Francis.”

Perhaps a little regretfully, though he was also gratified to know that Jerott’s concern would not be diverted so simply, Francis gave in with a smile. “Where to begin?”

These small words were enough to seal Jerott’s wary trust. Body and mind. He might never know as much of the soul, let alone understand it, as Philippa did. But this modest measure was the bounty of an oasis in the desert. Long had he wandered lost, hoping to find something of this by Gabriel’s side, or by proving to Marthe that he could be worthy of her love. False hopes; dead ends. Both turned him back to Francis, to the ease of friendship without worship, love without resentment. It had been a circuitous route, from Solway Moss to St Mary’s, but he had found out, at last, where he needed to be.

**Author's Note:**

> CHAPTER 2: wrote itself really, when I finished early for the deadline (I hadn't written in a while, had the office to myself for a week, and inspiration struck. Also I convinced myself in a panic that the deadline was 1 June). I wrote Chapter 1 with the idea of it being compete, so if you prefer your Francis/Jerott to remain unfulfilled then you don't need to read on.


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